Rethinking Long-Term, New-World Development: From Nations to Regions, From Property Rights to Labor-Types

• In Event: 198 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Democracy, Development, and Decline

Abstract

The very large literatures which seek to account for variations in long-term social and economic development across the nations of the western hemisphere are now quite diverse and have thus generated a good deal of the mutual criticism typically attendant to such richly diverse opinions. Yet such diversity also conceals common assumptions in how various authors measure developmental (lack of) success, in that virtually no one gives systematic attention – as opposed to passing reference – to deeply unequal patterns of long-tem development found at the level of subnational regions, not just entire colonial entities or post-colonial nation-states. Moreover, these authors do not routinely analyze patterns of free vs. coerced labor as analytically separate social forces capable of producing large-scale developmental effects independent of the colonizers’ identity (e.g., British vs. Spanish). This paper studies (under-)development through both of these new lenses and shows their predictive powers.

Author

• Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Georgetown University